Best practice: Use UTF-8 as your source code encoding

Software engineering teams have become more distributed in the last few years. It’s not uncommon to have programmers in multiple countries, maybe a team in Belarus and others in Japan and in the U.S. Each of these teams most likely speaks different languages, and most likely their host systems use different character encodings by default. That means that everyone’s source code editor creates files in different encodings too. You can imagine how mixed up and munged a shared source code repository might become when teams save, edit and re-save source files in multiple charset encodings. It happens, and it has happened to me when working with remote teams.

Here’s an example, you create a test file containing ASCII text. Overnight, your Japanese colleagues edit and save the file with a new test and add the following line in it:

String example = "Fight 文字化け！";

They save the file and submit it to the repository using Shift-JIS or some other common legacy encoding. You pick up the file the next day, add a couple lines to it, save it, and BAM! Data loss. Your editor creates garbage characters because it attempts to save the file in the ISO-8859-1 encoding. Instead of the correct Japanese text from above, your file now contains the text “Fight ?????” Not cool, not fun. And you’ve most likely broken the test as well.

How can you avoid these charset mismatches? The answer is to use a common charset across all your teams. The answer is to use Unicode, and more specifically, to use UTF-8. The reason is simple. I won’t try hard to defend this. It’s just seems obvious. Unicode is a superset of all other commonly used character sets. UTF-8, a specific encoding of Unicode, is backward compatible with ASCII character encoding, and all programming language source keywords and syntax (that I know) is composed of ASCII text. UTF-8 as a common charset encoding will allow all of your teams to share files, use characters that make sense for their tests or other source files, and never lose data again because of charset encoding mismatches.

If your editor has a setting for file encodings, use it and choose UTF-8. Train your team to use it too. Set up your ANT scripts and other build tools to use the UTF-8 encoding for compilations. You might have to explicitly tell your java compiler that source files are in UTF-8, but this is worth making the change. By the way, the javac command line argument you need is simply “-encoding UTF-8”.

Recently I was using NetBeans 7 in a project and discovered that it defaults to UTF-8. Nice! I was pleasantly surprised.

Regardless of your editor, look into this. Find out how to set your file encodings to UTF-8. You’ll definitely benefit from this in a distributed team environment in which people use different encodings. Standardize on this and make it part of your team’s best practices.

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